Understanding student's participation in physiotherapy and nursing work settings

Students’ health profession education includes learning at the workplace through placements. For students, participating in daily work activities in interaction with supervisors, co-workers and peers is a valuable practice to learn the expertise that is needed to become
a health care professional. To contribute to the understanding of HPE-students’ workplace learning, the focus of this study is to identify afordances and characterise student’s participation during placements. We applied a research design based on observations. Three student-physiotherapists and four student-nurses were shadowed during two of their placement days. A categorisation of afordances is provided, in terms of students’ participation in activities, direct interactions and indirect interactions. Students’ daily participation in placements is discussed through unique combinations and sequences of the identifed afordances refecting changing patterns over time, and diferences in the degree of presence or absence of supervisors, co-workers and peers.